Wow – Alex has a very dark role! It must have been hard to play this part.

It’s 1926 when we first meet Cecil, age 8, one afternoon in the cotton fields of Macon, Georgia. Within minutes, his mother (Mariah Carey) is raped by a white plantation owner (Alex Pettyfer), who then shoots the boy’s father (David Banner) in the middle of the forehead. Upset by her son’s murdering ways, which the law will overlook, Annabeth Westfall (Vanessa Redgrave) decides to make it up to Cecil: “I’m gonna teach you how to be a house nigger.”

The fact that those other characters are played by a constellation of big stars keeps The Butler entertaining, at least, as it cruises through history like a visit to Disney’s Hall of Presidents. We start with Cecil on the sharecropper farm where he worked as a child, and where the petulant young owner (Alex Pettyfer, perfectly cast) rapes Cecil’s mother (Mariah Carey) and murders his father without a second look. The owner’s kindly mother (Vanessa Redgrave) trains Cecil to work inside the house and soon he’s packed his bags off to the city, where a bartender (Clarence Williams III) trains him, a fancy D.C. hotel hires him, and soon Cecil’s been scouted to join the kitchen staff at the White House.